For those of you who have been here from day one or twelve, THANK YOU!
If you are BRAND NEW to this newsletter, welcome! This newsletter has given me a burst of unexpected joy, and I am so glad we are here sharing cyberspace together. This is not a newsy letter. It offers no health remedies, daily prompts, or art lessons. It grants no therapeutic guidance. It is not a diary of my life as a homesteading botanist on a prairie. This is a newsletter dedicated to my tender love for those of us who were raised as latchkey kids, telling our surprising, charming, and disorienting stories.
Almost all of my Substack newsletters are free to read. That said, if you find yourself eager to support me as an artist in this world of chance and whimsy or wish to pay me for the time I spend looking things up on powerthesaurus.org, I will gladly accept your monthly subscription commitment with deep gratitude. Each newsletter, on no particular schedule, is my way of introducing you to someone special who has contributed to my book, Latchkey Township. I want you to treasure each of them as much as I do.
I met this month’s Latchkey Township contributor, Janna Wallack, on the first day of my five-year career as an assistant teacher. Despite my second-grade autobiography claiming so, I never actually set out to be a teacher. I wasn’t even sure how to spell it.
But my town's beloved de facto circus ringmaster, Barbara Piambino, asked me one day to be her teaching assistant. I had always adored her, and I figured I could pick up some fresh skills and establish some financial safety rails, seeing as my own personal churn at the time was an unorthodox job I had invented out of thin air. Years before, I had decided to be a coloring book author who goes on tour! Who does that?! This job brought me to extraordinary heights, from collecting vegetable oil from dumpsters as fuel for our tour vehicle to teaching workshops at the Dancing Rabbit Eco-Village and some of the country's last remaining women’s bookstores. I slept in punk houses alongside dumpstered endive and bucket-flushed toilets. I stayed in collectives where members were called to meet via conch shells to discuss whether or not we were cops before we were allowed to share their quinoa and soy yogurt.
Fresh off a few weirdly wonderful years traversing the US and Canada, I was ready to hunker down for a new episode of life. I had gone as feral as a latchkey kid again and had a renewed readiness to engage with “polite society.” I loved advocating for kids, writing for kids, and hanging out with kids, so maybe being a teacher at this bohemian school where they studied the moon and poetry could be a just-right move to make.
My first assistant teaching position was in Janna Wallack’s daughter’s third-grade classroom. It was a small, intimate school, and my students' parents welcomed me with open arms. Janna was summarily warm, consistently making me laugh with her irreverent sense of humor. Considering it was my first year at a new workplace, I was sometimes as wide-eyed as the students in those first weeks. She made me feel like I belonged.
Weeks fell into months, and months became years. I had the good fortune of being the assistant teacher of this same class for three years in a row. As we navigated third, fourth, and fifth grades together, these kids became my squad. I incubated new ideas alongside them, inquisitively learning about cetaceans and the Birmingham Children’s Crusade. It has been over a decade since I worked at that school. Yet, Janna and many of those families remain lifelong friends because of our years spent soothing splintered hearts, losing one of our dears to childhood cancer, crying at school plays together, and watching our beloveds grow.
Besides being one of the first to contribute to Latchkey Township, Janna spent the last several years writing a phenomenal new book. I had the privilege of reading an early draft, and honestly, could not put it down. This semi-autobiographical work about a quasi-utopian cult overseen by a drug-smuggling father set in Miami Beach in the 1980s hit all the right notes for me. The sibling protagonists are forbidden from ever attending school and are left to take care of themselves while their dad goes away for weeks at a time, wrangling massive amounts of drugs onto speedboats. Latchkey x 10,000!
Being a latchkey kid means various things to different people. Janna paints a latchkey life that is both oasis and mad asylum, at once chaotic and carefree. Her characters long for some out-of-reach comfort of home. She fits right into Latchkey Township.
Like Neko Case and Christina Hunt Wood, Janna’s submission to the book is in list format. I love lists so much that I bought a book entitled Lists: To-dos, Illustrated Inventories, Collected Thoughts, and Other Artists’ Enumerati.
Ten Things I Did While Waiting for My Parents to Get Home
by JANNA BROOKE WALLACK
1. Invited other neighboring latchkey kids to my house after the last day of school for an epic BYOD (Bring Your Own Dad’s) shaving cream fight in my yard, ending with serving everyone Ritz Crackers with Squeeze Cheese and Sunny Delight.
2. Played Silver Spoons with Sara C., where we alternated turns being Ricky and his love interest, pretending to make out with our hands as blockers between our lips.
3. Went through all of my dad’s drawers, suit pockets, and armchair cushions to amass the $3.50 it would take to get a bus and pay for a $1.50 Saturday matinee, plus popcorn and a return bus back home.
4. “Borrowed” my dad’s tools and scavenged wood and scrap from neighbors’ yards and garbage piles to construct a never-finished, ever-moving, always-changing clubhouse between the tree and the back wall of our yard.
5. Stopped in lots of friends’ houses over the four-block walk home from the bus: Adam A. had a rope swing in his playroom; Steve G. had a trampoline and a golf cart, and his mom always bought at least $30 worth of whatever cheap, waxy fundraising chocolate the school was making us sell; Spencer M. had snack cakes and cats; Geoff H. had a wall of hamsters in a vast and elaborate network of cages; and Andy K. was super handsome and shy, and he and his little brother were funny and both professional actors.
6. Watched reruns of the best of the sixties and seventies: Good Times, The Brady Bunch, The Munsters, Family Affair, One Day at a Time, The Jeffersons, Alice, That Girl, Sanford & Son, Too Close for Comfort, Perry Mason, Leave it to Beaver, and It’s a Living.
7. Played epic games of Monopoly with my sister and brother and fought when she picked the “You are Assessed for Street Repairs” card from the Community Chest. Instead of paying her taxes, she ATE the card and picked another.
8. Retaliated for the loss of Monopoly and the fist fight by stealing my sister’s underpants, soaking them in the kitchen sink, and then putting them in the ice maker.
9. Put on a full ballet outfit, including bun, leotard, tights, and shoes, and danced every ballet move I ever learned, plus a whole bunch of new stuff I invented, to the only two cassette tapes I could find that afternoon: Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night and Billy Joel’s Zanzibar, until the batteries ran out in my tape recorder.
10. Laid on my back in the grass of our yard, looked up at the sky and reveled in the boredom, imagining other lives, yearning for bigger things, and wondering what to think about, create, and do with the burdensome excess of time.
Thank you, as always, for reading.
xo, Jacinta
Loved Janna's list of 10❤️
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